Hello all
A couple of interesting bits and pieces have come my way in the last few days.
I was in Canada recently, at the conference of the Movement for Canadian Literacy
http://www.literacy.ca/ . The aim of the forum was to strengthen the connections between literacy (traditionally defined) and ESL (i.e. ESOL) - unsurprisingly there are many students turning up in literacy classes who have langauge needs which would be recognised by ESL teachers. Sounds familiar? In Canada, ESL (i.e. ESOL) literacy is defined quite narrowly in a way similar to how we might think of beginner ESOL literacy here. The Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB) (i.e. the ESL curriculum) is widely used in Canada,
http://language.ca/display_page.asp?page_id=254 for a link to the .pdf of the ESL benchmarks.
I now have a link to the parallel CLB for ESL literacy learners
http://language.ca/display_page.asp?page_id=255 for a link to the .pdf of the ESL literacy benchmarks.
I'm not sure myself how useful a document this is; national curriculums have drawbacks as well as benefits, after all. But when I was in Canada I gained a strong feeling that what literacy teachers wanted was some framework or structure to help them think about ESL literacy at a national level, that is, they were looking for ways to think of ESL literacy in common. Certainly some people were embracing the ESL literacy curriculum as the solver of problems, which I'm not sure it is.
Also the E-Square home page. E-Square is the Boston area ESL programme. Thanks to Charles Ramsay for forwarding this. It looks like a very nice way to present ESOL resources.
http://alri.org/esquare/ <http://alri.org/esquare/>
And here's a link to the Intersections blog. I've mentioned this one before - a source for all things to do with transnational/migration studies. It's run by Lauren Wagner, PhD student at UCL, and colleagues. The first item at the moment is a link to the Nick Broomfeld film 'Still human still here': "made for Amnesty International to highlight the issue of destitute refused asylum seekers in the UK."
http://intersections.wordpress.com/
Cheers
James
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